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I am looking for a translation of a passage in The Visuddhimagga it is in the section XIII.28. So far I can have only found it in roman lettering. The part of the passage I want reads "The mental and material are really here. But there is no humanity to be found. For it is void and merely fashioned like a doll. Just suffering piled up from grass and sticks."

It would be extremely valuable to me personally to have the translation, which I am finding very hard to find. And I would also be extremely grateful to anyone who could point me in the right direction in terms of finding it.

The Visuddhimagga was composed in Pali (not Sanskrit). Do you mean that you can find the Pali for that passage, but using Roman letters, and you want it written in some Indian script instead? I'm not sure if it is known what script it was originally written down in...

The Visuddhimagga was composed in Pali (not Sanskrit). Do you mean that you can find the Pali for that passage, but using Roman letters, and you want it written in some Indian script instead? I'm not sure if it is known what script it was originally written down in...

Mike

Hi Mike
I think it might be an ancient precursor of sinhalese script. My understanding is that early Buddhist manuscripts are extremely rare and the earliest extent copy may have already been transribed into a different script from its original.
Perhaps some of our Pali scholars can comment.
Cheers

Ben

“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Learn this from the waters:
in mountain clefts and chasms,
loud gush the streamlets,
but great rivers flow silently.
- Sutta Nipata 3.725

Emmet wrote:Yes sorry, I probably mean in Devangari script. Just any script it was in before being translated into Roman lettering or outright English.

The Roman lettering isn't a "translation" any more than pinyin is a "translation" of Chinese.
"Transliteration" might be the word you need...

If you go to this page, on the Site that TiltBillings mentioned:http://www.omniglot.com/writing/pali.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
you'll see a one-to-one correspondence between the Devanāgarī alphabet used for Pāli and the Roman alphabet used for Pāli (in some cases there are clusters of two Roman letters and/or diacritical marks).